Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Amy Wright: I Intend to Talk to You Seriously

There is a New Yorker
cartoon on my refrigerator by Charles Barsotti that depicts two
middle-aged gentleman seated over espresso cups. The caption reads “I
keep my life well ordered so I can be outrageous in my private
thoughts.” Outrageous—from the Old French ultrage “to
push beyond bounds”—is not how this mustachioed speaker’s
friends would describe him. Far out he is not—ha ha! But I get him.
The drawing puts his persevering malteses in touch with my rough
likenesses.

Essays
are outrageous like that. With one line they put in conversation Harry Mathews’ The Case of the Persevering Maltese—which
puts in conversation St. Augustine and Marcel Duchamp—with Lia
Purpura’s Rough Likeness,
which itself puts Madame Lulu, visiting from South Africa, in touch
with Paul Celan.

They push past the
bounds of the given, overthrow the assumptions we inherited, invent
new norms, like those formative late night talks in college when
friends and I spent whole afternoons voicing newfound beliefs,
complicating each other’s questions, deepening empathy and stirring
up saucier half shells for the world that was our oyster. But
gradually those wide open windows of time narrowed into panes of
hours. The back porch sofas were hauled to the dump, and clean
well-lighted places became working lunches. The world, though, did
not stop expanding after adolescence, nor did the need to process our
past and future actions close like the Rising Sun Bakery. I still
needed somewhere to set my mug and seek out meaningful exchange. The
essay became that folding table, a portable cafe for heart-to-hearts
and battles of wit.

My
role as nonfiction editor of Zone 3
journal and Zone 3 Press is best understood in this way—to generate
the energy of discourse in which what is at issue is in conversation
across issues. Concerns and joys spread like the grapevine that
carries the rumor that Ander Monson’s typing teacher once threw an
electric typewriter from the fifth floor window of his high school,
in “Keyboarding.” Or, the philosophical equation Marianne Janack uses to explain to her
husband the relationship between a Ducati he wants to a vasectomy he
does not. I take in such stories like memories. A literary journal
serves our need to connect, the way an essay can.

“Connection”
has a romantic vibe, but relationships raise bars we are likely to
resist. We might better imagine these perspective-altering encounters
as inevitable, like a family. I grew up going to family
reunions so large I left certain I was two degrees of Aunt Diane away
from half the town. It is easy to imagine the writers that stretch
over the almost thirty years of Zone 3’s history as kin.

Literary community is similar to the
family Rebecca McClanahan pictures in her multi-generational memoir,
The Tribal Knot.
Her relations challenge each other to re-examine their preconceptions
about race, loss, love, place, and the desire to keep silent. No one
is immune from this kind of influence—including McClanahan—who
says in an interview with me after the book’s release that she had
not planned to weave her story into that of her ancestors, but living
and dead relatives seemed to insist: “Come on out, you coward.
You’re part of this family too!”

When
I joined Zone 3’s editorial board in 2007, the journal had been
printing only poetry and fiction for over twenty years. Opening
submissions to nonfiction, I anticipated, would redefine our
aesthetic. Wanting this new venue to reflect the genre’s range, I
sent out calls for lyric meditations, flash manifestos, cultural
criticism intertwined with personal narratives. Did I use the word
opera? Maybe. I held up Anne Carson’s Decreation
as a model. The potential for expression was thrilling, considering
we had invited the genre that begins where other forms leave off. Ned
Stuckey-French and Carl Klaus’ anthology, Essayists on
the Essay, had not yet been
released, but I was looking for the kind of essays they say embody “a
multistable impression of the self...in the process of sharing
thought with others.”

Conversation can extend one’s
reach, Walter Pater suggests
later in the same anthology. According to him, the “really large and
adventurous possibilities” of the essay arise from the dialectic
method of question and answer, as in the Platonic Dialogues.

My interest in
nonfiction is deeply intertwined with the collaborative assay that is
the interview. Each issue of the journal, I try to contribute between
one and four. My favorite explanation of the draw of the form came
last fall when I asked Dan Beachy-Quick for his take on the dynamic, which he says "seems to offer,
ideally, a profound kind of trespass, an overhearing, in which the
actual importance of two people talking together exists not in the
conversation itself, but rather in the intimacy only
trespass allows, a glance, a glimpse, a listening in that feels
worthy exactly because it doesn’t
initially belong to you at all."

Such an interlocutor seems to say, “I intend to talk to you
seriously,” as Harry Mathews begins his essay “For Prizewinners.” Such a considerate opening is inviting, but what makes me
lean in for the next line is that “you” he is addressing, the
multitudes of whom I am so curious to know.

So
perhaps the grand contribution of the essay is its access—to
people, to minutia, to experiences one has never had but sensations
she might. Access is how I think of Nicole Walker’s gesture to wet
her finger and taste her father’s cremated ashes in “Skin of the Earth.”
A desire to take some measure of his death pushes against the bounds
of her condition like a blue eye of beach glass.

Were Nicole
sitting beside me like the men in Barsotti’s drawing, friendly and receptive as she is, I doubt I would ask, “Why did you finger your father’s velvet box of dust?”
As it is, the question seeds a conversation within the text. I pick
up on a crucial bit of information that around the time of her
adolescence, the man who taught her to ride a bike came “to prefer
drinks to kids,” and this exchange takes on a revelatory quality. I
grasp how long her grief is against the impossibility of reclaiming
him. Such is the authorial work I suspect one cannot teach, but only
draw a fathom line to chart its depth, pull out a topo map to gain a
sense of scale. Checked by no limitations but our own, the elements
are clear, breaking down against the desert Walker and her sisters
are crossing to scatter his ash.

Within every
conversation inheres potential for conversion.

In “Tradition
and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot describes “the action
which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is
introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.”
He is referring to a poet’s development of consciousness, but the
illustration also speaks to us here, considering how exchange is catalytic.

Amy Wright is the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press, the author of four chapbooks, and the recipient of a Peter Taylor fellowship for the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop. Her nonfiction appears in Bellingham Review, Brevity, Passages North, Drunken Boat, Tupelo Quarterly, and is forthcoming in DIAGRAM and Kenyon Review.

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